When a silver halide photographic sensitive material is subjected to color development after exposed to light, an oxidized aromatic primary amine developing agent reacts with dye forming couplers to form dye images. Generally, in this process, a color reproduction process by a subtractive process is used, wherein dye images of yellow, magenta and cyan which are complement colors of blue, green and red are formed in order to reproduce blue, green and red. As the cyan dye image forming coupler, phenols and naphthols have often been used. However, color images obtained from phenols or naphthols used hitherto have many problems in preservability. For example, color images obtained from 2-acylaminophenol cyan couplers described in U.S. Pat. Nos. 2,367,531 and 2,423,730 have generally inferior fastness to heat, color images obtained from 2,5-diacylaminophenol cyan couplers described in U.S. Pat. Nos. 2,369,929 and 2,772,162 have generally inferior fastness to light, and 1-hydroxy-2-naphthamide cyan couplers are generally insufficient with respect to their fastness to both heat and light.
On the other hand, phenol cyan couplers having a ureido group in 2-position thereof described in U.S. Pat. Nos. 3,446,622, 3,996,253, 3,758,308 and 3,880,661 and Japanese Patent Application (OPI) No. 65134/81 (the term "OPI" as used herein refers to a "published unexamined Japanese patent application") are said to have good fastness to light as compared with the above described conventional cyan couplers. However, their fastness is not sufficient for preserving for a long period of time. Further, many of these couplers are not desirable because they easily crystallize out when added to the photographic emulsion, due to their low solubility in high boiling point organic solvents.